Year: 2004

BBC: Brain 'may trigger over-eating'

MEMO TO THE BBC: Get the loading dock ready. There’s a big truckload of “Duh!” coming your way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always glad when stories appear in the press pointing out that obesity is not simply a product of gluttony. I just get annoyed when this is portrayed as a revolutionary new discovery. It isn’t. We’ve know it for a long time. It’s simply that the news media (of which the BBC news service is at least ostensibly a part) has not done an effective job communicating the fact. Instead of doing real investigative journalism into the subject, they have been content to pass off to the public the expostulations of countless diet and exercise quacks, including that people are obese because they simply and irresponsibly eat too much.

Wrong.

Eating more calories than the body requires is part of the obesity phenomenon, but the situation is way more complicated than that, and it isn’t hard to tell why. Let’s do a little math:

1) Suppose that a particular 20-year old person needs to consume 2500 calories a day given his metabolism and level of exercise. (This is not at all unreasonable. The “2000-calorie recommended daily intake” that you read about on food labels is–for some unexplained reason–based on the calories consumed by the average post-menopausal woman. It is not representative of what a younger person or a male person needs to eat.)

2) Now suppose that the person actually eats 10% too many calories, or an extra 250 calories per day. Know how much weight the person will gain in a year?

3) 250 calories x 365 days = 91,250 calories. Since there are about 3550 calories per pound of body fat, the person would gain 25.7 lbs. in the course of a year.

4) Now let’s suppose that we project the trend into the future. Suppose that the person continues to eat 250 too many calories per day for a decade. At the end of ten years, when the person is 30, he will have gained 257 lbs. and can be expected to weigh between 400 and 500 lbs.

Know very many 30-year old people who weigh between 400 and 500 lbs?

Didn’t think so.

Even people who give no attention at all to their caloric intake (such people being legion) do not usually gain 26 pounds a year or end up weighing between 400 and 500 pounds by the time they are thirty.

The only possible explanation for this is that the great majority of people–even overweight people–are not overeating more than 250 calories a day.

Now let’s flip the situation around:

5) Suppose that the same 20-year old person underate by 250 calories per day? How many pounds would he lose in a year? That’s right 25.7.

6) And what would happen in a decade? He’d be dead.

If he were magically able to continue losing weight evenly throughout the decade, he would have exhausted his entire body mass before the decade was up. In reality, though, unless you are The Incredible Shrinking Man, you can’t continue to lose body mass indefinitely. You’d probably die around the time you hit 70-90 lbs.

This means that people do not undereat by more than 250 calories per day, either.

Except for a the rare cases of a few individuals who starve themselves to death or who gain 250 pounds in a decade, most people consistently stay within an average of 250 calories of where the number they need to metabolize each day or within about 10% of the needed amount.

Further, even people who give no attention at all to their diet do this. The only conclusion is that there is a mechanism in the human body that pushes us to stay within that range of our needed caloric intake. (In actuality, the range is narrower than I have indicated, but I wanted to use simple obvious numbers to make the point.) Our bodies have a “weight regulator” fuction that works like a thermostat, keeping our caloric intake within a modest range of the number of calories we need per day.

From a phenomenological perspective, the tools the body uses to keep us in that range are feelings of hunger and satiety. When the body wants to jack up our calorie intake, it hits us with feelings of hunger. When it wants to tamp down our calorie intake, it hits us with feelings of satiety.

This means that the great majority of overweight people are not simply gluttonously sucking down food. If they were, their weight would quickly spiral out of control and keep going up until they died. Instead, they are simply eating when their body tells them to eat and not eating when it tells them to stop. In other words, they are responding to the biological imperative that is implanted in them.

Now, for obese people something has obviously gone wrong with the situation or they wouldn’t be overweight, but for most the problem is not the vice of gluttony. They are simply doing what their body is telling them to do.

I don’t have space in this blog entry to talk about what has gone wrong or how it can be fixed, but I’ll be happy to do so if folks want me to.

For now, we need to bear the above in mind when we are tempted to look down on people who are overweight–or who are more simply overweight than we are. Unless they’re experiencing rapid weight gain at the moment, they’re not eating beyond what their bodies are asking them to.

BBC: Brain ‘may trigger over-eating’

MEMO TO THE BBC: Get the loading dock ready. There’s a big truckload of “Duh!” coming your way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always glad when stories appear in the press pointing out that obesity is not simply a product of gluttony. I just get annoyed when this is portrayed as a revolutionary new discovery. It isn’t. We’ve know it for a long time. It’s simply that the news media (of which the BBC news service is at least ostensibly a part) has not done an effective job communicating the fact. Instead of doing real investigative journalism into the subject, they have been content to pass off to the public the expostulations of countless diet and exercise quacks, including that people are obese because they simply and irresponsibly eat too much.

Wrong.

Eating more calories than the body requires is part of the obesity phenomenon, but the situation is way more complicated than that, and it isn’t hard to tell why. Let’s do a little math:

1) Suppose that a particular 20-year old person needs to consume 2500 calories a day given his metabolism and level of exercise. (This is not at all unreasonable. The “2000-calorie recommended daily intake” that you read about on food labels is–for some unexplained reason–based on the calories consumed by the average post-menopausal woman. It is not representative of what a younger person or a male person needs to eat.)

2) Now suppose that the person actually eats 10% too many calories, or an extra 250 calories per day. Know how much weight the person will gain in a year?

3) 250 calories x 365 days = 91,250 calories. Since there are about 3550 calories per pound of body fat, the person would gain 25.7 lbs. in the course of a year.

4) Now let’s suppose that we project the trend into the future. Suppose that the person continues to eat 250 too many calories per day for a decade. At the end of ten years, when the person is 30, he will have gained 257 lbs. and can be expected to weigh between 400 and 500 lbs.

Know very many 30-year old people who weigh between 400 and 500 lbs?

Didn’t think so.

Even people who give no attention at all to their caloric intake (such people being legion) do not usually gain 26 pounds a year or end up weighing between 400 and 500 pounds by the time they are thirty.

The only possible explanation for this is that the great majority of people–even overweight people–are not overeating more than 250 calories a day.

Now let’s flip the situation around:

5) Suppose that the same 20-year old person underate by 250 calories per day? How many pounds would he lose in a year? That’s right 25.7.

6) And what would happen in a decade? He’d be dead.

If he were magically able to continue losing weight evenly throughout the decade, he would have exhausted his entire body mass before the decade was up. In reality, though, unless you are The Incredible Shrinking Man, you can’t continue to lose body mass indefinitely. You’d probably die around the time you hit 70-90 lbs.

This means that people do not undereat by more than 250 calories per day, either.

Except for a the rare cases of a few individuals who starve themselves to death or who gain 250 pounds in a decade, most people consistently stay within an average of 250 calories of where the number they need to metabolize each day or within about 10% of the needed amount.

Further, even people who give no attention at all to their diet do this. The only conclusion is that there is a mechanism in the human body that pushes us to stay within that range of our needed caloric intake. (In actuality, the range is narrower than I have indicated, but I wanted to use simple obvious numbers to make the point.) Our bodies have a “weight regulator” fuction that works like a thermostat, keeping our caloric intake within a modest range of the number of calories we need per day.

From a phenomenological perspective, the tools the body uses to keep us in that range are feelings of hunger and satiety. When the body wants to jack up our calorie intake, it hits us with feelings of hunger. When it wants to tamp down our calorie intake, it hits us with feelings of satiety.

This means that the great majority of overweight people are not simply gluttonously sucking down food. If they were, their weight would quickly spiral out of control and keep going up until they died. Instead, they are simply eating when their body tells them to eat and not eating when it tells them to stop. In other words, they are responding to the biological imperative that is implanted in them.

Now, for obese people something has obviously gone wrong with the situation or they wouldn’t be overweight, but for most the problem is not the vice of gluttony. They are simply doing what their body is telling them to do.

I don’t have space in this blog entry to talk about what has gone wrong or how it can be fixed, but I’ll be happy to do so if folks want me to.

For now, we need to bear the above in mind when we are tempted to look down on people who are overweight–or who are more simply overweight than we are. Unless they’re experiencing rapid weight gain at the moment, they’re not eating beyond what their bodies are asking them to.

And While We're On The Subject Of The Millennium . . .

Another reader writes:

My question is: In our parish men’s group the question of the 1000 year reign mentioned in the Book of Revelations was brought up. The question of it’s literalness was the focus. While it was discussed that it is only figurative I wanted to get your response to this and any materials, articles and resources you can recommend.

I’d recommend this article on the Catholic Answers website.

And While We’re On The Subject Of The Millennium . . .

Another reader writes:

My question is: In our parish men’s group the question of the 1000 year reign mentioned in the Book of Revelations was brought up. The question of it’s literalness was the focus. While it was discussed that it is only figurative I wanted to get your response to this and any materials, articles and resources you can recommend.

I’d recommend this article on the Catholic Answers website.

Days of Wine and Vengeance

A reader writes:

Are you familiar with a book by David Chilton called Days of Vengence: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation? If you have heard of it I was wondering if you had an opinion on it.

For those who may not be aware of it, Days of Vengeance is a book written in the postmillennialist Protestant tradition. In particular, it’s part of the neo-postmillennialism that has gained popularity in theonomic circles. It is probably the most popular commentary on Revelation from this perspective.

Catholic theology doesn’t infallibly reject postmillennialism (the belief that Christ will return at the conclusion of a future golden age of Christianity on earth), but it does strongly resist the idea (see CCC 673-677). The Catholic position is what in Protestant terms would be described as “amillennialism” (the belief that the present Church age is the millennium in which Christ and the saints reign from heaven and, thorugh the Church, on earth).

Days of Vengeance, when it comes down to the crunch-chapter of Revelation 20 (which deals with the millennium) suddenly starts extending olive branches to the amillennialist position, but most of the book is informed by the kind of arrogant postmillennialism that makes many theonomic writings simply insufferable. It also has loads of WAY speculative stuff in it that I can’t recommend.

That being said, the book can be useful if you’re willing to take it with several teaspoons of salt. It can provide help in seeing Revelation through a different set of eyes than Dispensationalists (the Left Behind crowd) see it through. If you’re willing to hold your nose when dealing with the theonomic attitude problem (Gary North’s intro to the book is particularly noxious in this regard) and exercise the critical thinking needed to cross-examine the book’s interpretations, then it can be helpful. You can download it here.

A few notes:

1) The author of the book–David Chilton–apparently later went nuts and embraced a view known as pantelism, which holds that ALL biblical prophecy (including the Second Coming of Christ) has already been fulfilled.

2) Days of Vengeance was written before Chilton became a pantelist, when he was only a preterist (a position that holds that most of the book of Revelation has already been fulfilled, but not the Second Coming).

3) One should NOT suppose, however, that Days of Vengeance is representative of preterism in general. There are other (and, in my view, better) preterist interpretations on many points than what Chilton presents, so I’d advise you to read more broadly in preterism rather than concluding that Chilton has said all that needs to be said.

4) Also, be aware that not everything that goes under the preterist name should do so. Many pantelists wish to be called preterists and so have been calling themselves this, though there is a marked difference between the two positions (pantelism, by relegating the Second Coming to the past, is heresy that is in conflict with the Nicene Creed, while preterism may well be true).

Hope this helps!

PAPER: "State warns Floridians to watch for giant African land snails"

Man, what a disappointment! With a headline like that I want to see shaky home video footage of local yokels running and screaming while 50-ft. tall snails ooze menacingly down the interstates running through the Everglades.

Okay, so it turns out that the so-called “giant” African land snails are kind of giant, relative to other snails. They’re eight inches long. And there is a reason to avoid them (they carry a parasite that can give you meningitis), but I’m still disappointed. I wanted to see pictures out of a Ray Harryhausen film or something! You just can’t use a headline that juicy if you aren’t going to deliver the goods.

giantsnailsI guess if I want to see giant snails menacing people, I’ll have to go rent The Monster That Challenged The World, which actually only challenged a small part of Southern California near San Diego after errupting from the Salton Sea–an accidentally-created artificial lake less than a hundred years old that nevertheless is home in the movie to giant snails that have been hibernating for millions of years.

An interesting tidbit about real-world snails: My sister is a biologist who works for the government, and one of her former assignments was going out in the field and doing a population survey of the local snail population. She and her team were supposed to collect a particular kind of snail and count how many there were in a zone. The trouble is, the species that they were assigned to count looks very much like another kind of snail that is a PREDATOR. Yes! That’s right! There are predator snails who will hunt down and the other snails that they look like! According to my sister, the predator snails were a real frustration because if you collected one by mistake you’d look down at your collecting pad later and see that there was a slow-motion snail-i-cidal attack underway, with a predator bearing down on one of the grazers at full speed and trying to eat it, which could–like–throw your snail count off or something.

PAPER: “State warns Floridians to watch for giant African land snails”

Man, what a disappointment! With a headline like that I want to see shaky home video footage of local yokels running and screaming while 50-ft. tall snails ooze menacingly down the interstates running through the Everglades.

Okay, so it turns out that the so-called “giant” African land snails are kind of giant, relative to other snails. They’re eight inches long. And there is a reason to avoid them (they carry a parasite that can give you meningitis), but I’m still disappointed. I wanted to see pictures out of a Ray Harryhausen film or something! You just can’t use a headline that juicy if you aren’t going to deliver the goods.

giantsnailsI guess if I want to see giant snails menacing people, I’ll have to go rent The Monster That Challenged The World, which actually only challenged a small part of Southern California near San Diego after errupting from the Salton Sea–an accidentally-created artificial lake less than a hundred years old that nevertheless is home in the movie to giant snails that have been hibernating for millions of years.

An interesting tidbit about real-world snails: My sister is a biologist who works for the government, and one of her former assignments was going out in the field and doing a population survey of the local snail population. She and her team were supposed to collect a particular kind of snail and count how many there were in a zone. The trouble is, the species that they were assigned to count looks very much like another kind of snail that is a PREDATOR. Yes! That’s right! There are predator snails who will hunt down and the other snails that they look like! According to my sister, the predator snails were a real frustration because if you collected one by mistake you’d look down at your collecting pad later and see that there was a slow-motion snail-i-cidal attack underway, with a predator bearing down on one of the grazers at full speed and trying to eat it, which could–like–throw your snail count off or something.

Vatican Astro-Geek Gives Interview!

Br_Guy_Consolmagno2Can you see this man wearing Spock ears at a Trek convention?

You might!

He’s a self-confessed sci-fi fan who works for the Vatican. In fact, he’s the Vatican’s “curator of meteorites.” Dr. Guy Consolmagno also recently gave an interview with Astrobiology Magazine in which he discussed all manner of interesting things (and apparently frustrated the less-than-fully-friendly-to-Christianity interviewer who talked to him).

Many folks don’t know it, but the Vatican’s interest in astronomy has continued down to today and the Holy See has a number of astronomers on its payroll. It also maintains an observatory that’s basically in my back yard (well, in the state of Arizona, anyway).

In the interview, Consolmagno talks about the Vatican astronomy program and is refreshingly open about it, and is willing to kick back as good as he gets kicked. A curialista he ain’t. Consider these exchanges:

Interviewer: And why does the Vatican fund this research?

Consolmagno: There’s a political reason. It’s a simple one, that they want the world to know that the Church isn’t afraid of science, that they like science, that science is great, this is our way of seeing how God created the universe, and they want to make as strong a statement as possible that truth doesn’t contradict truth, that if you have faith, then you’re not going to ever be afraid of what science is going to come up with. Because it’s true.

And the one time in history that they screwed up on this, the Galileo affair, the Church was wrong. And we’ve admitted it was wrong. How many times has science abused the Church? How often have you heard a scientist apologize to the Church? . . .

Consolmagno: One of the nice things about being paid by the Vatican is that I don’t have to worry about NASA politics. I don’t have to write grant proposals. I don’t have to find out what’s the flavor of the month this month. I can do anything I want.

Interviewer: You don’t have to worry about Vatican politics?

Consolmagno: Nope. They barely know we exist. My instructions when I arrived there were: do good science, period.

He also seems to know how to have a good time:

Interviewer: What do you hope to get out of being here at the Astrobiology Science Conference?

Consolmagno: Oh, having a good time. And, fundamentally, that’s why we do science, because it’s really enjoyable. . . .

In addition, in some way, I’m waving the Church flag. Just by walking around with this badge that says “Vatican Observatory,” I’m reminding people that, yes, there is indeed a religious aspect, and indeed, an ethical aspect to science.

Consolmagno has a good sense of humor, and it shows in the article. He’s got a number of interesting and thoughtful things to say, including addressing the perennial question of what the Chuch would think if we had proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Julius Caesar, Your Library Card Has Been REVOKED!

libraryofalexandiaIf you’re any kind of a history buff–or if you’ve watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos–you know about the famed Library of Alexandria, the most famous center of learning in the ancient world.

The site of the library has been lost for going on two millennia, but–turns out–it’s been found!

At least so says Dr. Zahi Hawass, curator of the Giza Plateau in Egypt, and a team of archaeologists from Poland.

Dr. Hawass is kind of a character. I’ve been following his career for a number of years, and the man seems to consider himself a kind of modern, Egyptian Indiana Jones. His antics when giving interviews can be a real hoot, but he’s not a flake when it comes to archaeology.

In fact, it is his job to reign in the nuttiness of a lot of what passes as Egyptology in certain circles. You know, they people they patterened the early, goofus version of Dr. Daniel Jackson off of. (*Cough*Robert Bauval . . . *Cough*Graham Hancock . . . ).

In other words: If Hawass says they’ve found the Library of Alexandria, they probably have.

Wicked awesome!

Hopefully, they’ll be able to find out the answers to some of the mysteries connected with the library, like how it was finally destroyed. There is considerable confusion on this point. The story linked above notes that it may have been destroyed by Julius Caesar, that’s far from certain, and there is evidence that the library survived after Caesar’s time (though it may have been rebuilt after he burned Alexandria)–see the wikipedia link, above.

What would be even cooler would be if they found a few of the works the library had in its possession but which have been lost to subsequent history.

I’d just hate to be the person who has to pay the library fine on those!